Tag Archives: Signaling

There’s a new digital version of an old analog joke that starts something like this: “Two WebRTC engineers walk into a bar to have a beer while they talk about signaling.” The problem is that it’s the hotel bar at the Hotel California, and the punchline is that the engineers never get to leave.

Hardly a day goes by without another blog post about signaling and WebRTC.

Some people think signaling should be standardized; others think we already have the answer in SIP or REST. Some think that the lack of a signaling specification (beyond the need to support SDP offer/answer) is a huge gap in the WebRTC standard.

We think that leaving signaling out was the smartest thing that the key drivers of the standard could have done, for three reasons:

Today, we’re really pleased to be introducing application-level signaling for our WebRTC implementation of OpenTok across both Web and iOS platforms.

Over the last two years, OpenTok has continued to break ground as a live video platform.

As we’ve watched use cases evolve from basic social chat all the way up to supporting complex customer support calls, we’ve also discovered that partners need more than just live video communications – they need a way to orchestrate and communicate between the application endpoints. So today, we are exposing our signaling layer to OpenTok 2.0 developers so that you can piggyback on the distributed, scaled infrastructure that’s been proven to work over the last two years.